The Djinguereber Mosque and the Timbuktu Manuscripts

What was destroyed, and why

When Ansar Dine and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took Timbuktu in 2012, they began destroying the earthen mausoleums of the Sufi saints buried across the city, tombs that Timbuktu families had rebuilt and replastered for centuries as an ordinary act of maintenance.

The justification given was the one made at Jannat al-Baqi: that venerating the dead at their graves is shirk, and that removing the tombs removes the occasion for it. Sixteen mausoleums, most of them inscribed as part of the World Heritage site, were attacked, along with the door of the Sidi Yahya mosque, which local tradition held should stay shut until the end of the world.

This was destruction of Muslim buildings by Muslims, on Islamic grounds, against the practice of the Muslim population living there, a fact that gets lost when the episode is described only as vandalism.

The trial

Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, who had headed the morality brigade that carried out the demolitions, was surrendered to the International Criminal Court and charged with the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion and historic monuments.

• He pleaded guilty in August 2016 and apologised to the people of Timbuktu.
• He was convicted and sentenced on 27 September 2016 to nine years, later reduced to seven on review.
• A reparations order of 17 August 2017 assessed his liability at 2.7 million euros and provided for individual, collective and symbolic reparations to the Timbuktu community.

It was the first ICC case brought solely for the destruction of cultural heritage, and the first ICC conviction on a guilty plea. Its significance is that it treated the destruction of a community's sacred buildings as a crime against that community rather than as damage to property or as an offence against a universal heritage abstracted from the people who maintained it.

UNESCO-coordinated reconstruction of the mausoleums, using the original earthen technique and local masons, was completed in 2015 and 2016.

The manuscripts, and a number to be careful with

The libraries were the other target. Timbuktu's manuscripts (on law, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, history and poetry, in Arabic and in African languages written in Arabic script, dating from roughly the thirteenth century to the twentieth), had survived because families kept them privately and quietly.

As the occupation took hold, Abdel Kader Haidara and others organised their evacuation, moving them out in footlockers by road and river to Bamako.

The figure usually given is around 350,000 manuscripts evacuated. It should be handled with care. Nobody has ever counted the manuscripts of Timbuktu; much of the material is uncatalogued, estimates of the total holdings vary widely, and the evacuation figure is an estimate produced under emergency conditions by people with an interest in conveying the scale of what was at risk. That the rescue happened, that it was substantial, and that it was carried out at real personal danger are not in question. The precise arithmetic is.

Similarly, Sankore is often called a university with tens of thousands of students. Teaching in Timbuktu was organised as it was elsewhere in the Islamic world, around individual scholars issuing licences to transmit particular texts, and there was no faculty, syllabus or matriculation. The retrofitted word flatters the place with the wrong compliment: what existed was a dense and durable scholarly network in a West African trading city, which is a more interesting thing than a campus.

When militants threatened Timbuktu's manuscripts in 2012, librarians did not wait for outside rescue; they smuggled hundreds of thousands of pages out by canoe themselves.

A city built on gold and scholarship

The Djinguereber Mosque was commissioned in the fourteenth century by Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, after his celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey during which his lavish gold spending reportedly disrupted currency values in the markets he passed through. The mosque helped anchor Timbuktu's rise as a centre of Islamic scholarship, trade and manuscript production, drawing scholars and students from across West Africa for centuries.

Hundreds of thousands of manuscripts

Private family libraries in Timbuktu accumulated an estimated several hundred thousand manuscripts over centuries, covering astronomy, law, medicine and theology, evidence of a sophisticated written intellectual tradition in West Africa that challenged colonial-era assumptions that the region's history was purely oral.

The 2012 rescue

When Ansar Dine and allied militants took control of Timbuktu in 2012 and began destroying Sufi shrines, librarian Abdel Kader Haidara organised a covert operation moving tens of thousands of manuscripts out of the city by road and river to safety in Bamako, an effort that saved the bulk of the collection. Militants nonetheless destroyed a number of ancient shrines and some manuscripts that could not be evacuated in time, an act for which a member of the group was later convicted at the International Criminal Court, the court's first conviction specifically for the destruction of cultural heritage.